Technological advances in IC materials and design have produced generations of ICs where each generation has smaller and more complex circuits than the previous generation. In the course of IC evolution, functional density (i.e., the number of interconnected devices per chip area) has generally increased while geometry size (i.e., the smallest component (or line) that can be created using a fabrication process) has decreased. This scaling down process generally provides benefits by increasing production efficiency and lowering associated costs.
Such scaling down has also increased the complexity of processing and manufacturing ICs and, for these advances to be realized, similar developments in IC processing and manufacturing are needed. For example, three-dimensional transistors such as a Fin Field-Effect Transistors (FinFETs) have been introduced to replace planar transistors. Although existing FinFET devices and methods of fabricating FinFET devices have been generally adequate for their intended purposes, more problems emerge with the increasing downscaling of circuits. For example, the FinFETs for different circuits such as core (logic) circuits, Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) circuits, and Input-Output devices may face different problems with the increasing downscaling of integrated circuits, which problems were not observed before.